Blown up out of all proportion

How do you darken happy memories of a Butlins holiday? Start looking at the old postcards in a new way, says Michael L Collins

By Michael L Collins

12:01AM BST 13 Jul 2002

The centrepiece of the annual Arles photography festival is an evening slide show in the Roman amphitheatre. Last weekend, to the strains of a Sandie Shaw song, a curiously familiar British picture filled the screen. Here, in lush 1970s colour, was the Viennese Ballroom at Butlins in Clacton, with a sea of dancers gliding around the floor. Overhead in the picture, buried in the plastic ferns and fuchsias that adorn the ceiling, neon decorations shine like stars. The band, up on a stage to the side, blow their notes over the couples, while onlookers seated in rows along the sides lend their support as an audience.

The entire scene is theatre, with the dancers, audience and plastic decorations all playing their part in this John Hinde colour postcard production. To aficionados, these postcards are instantly recognisable for their deep colour and the white strip at the bottom on which is printed the picture's location, and the legend "Photo: John Hinde Studios". His company's postcards of Butlins in the late 1960s and early 1970s were his brightest, most fantastic creations.

Billy Butlin, a hoop-la stallholder from Canada, set up his first holiday camp in Skegness in 1936. The story goes that he first spotted what became the company slogan - "Our true intent is all for your delight" - emblazoned on a fairground organ, little knowing that it was a line from A Midsummer Night's Dream. More than 10 million British holidaymakers have stayed at Butlins since then, and though modernised versions of the camps still exist, their glory days are over.

If, indeed, those days were glorious. At Butlins, all entertainments and pleasure rides were free to the campers, so to exclude non-paying guests, there was strict security, which inevitably invited comparisons to prison camps. Yet however enjoyable (or not), Butlins holiday camps have since passed into bright-eyed nostalgia, safely stored in the past along with pounds, shillings and pence.

John Hinde created instant nostalgia. He believed that postcards should look like idealised memories. Not how it was, necessarily, but how people would remember it. Hinde was no stranger to the art of promotion; earlier in his career, he had worked as a circus impresario. He started his postcard company in 1956 in Ireland, which was then at the beginning of a tourism boom fuelled by the arrival of Americans stopping off at Shannon airport.

Hinde was already a celebrated colour photographer and knew how to make vivid pictures. He had also studied printing and could achieve better colour saturation than any of his competitors. During the printing stage, known technically as "post-production", Hinde made it a practice to delete "unsightly" objects such as pylons from pictures, and to add desirable effects. Dull skies would become deep blue or a flaming sunset.

As Hinde once admitted with elegant understatement, "In some cases the lily is gilded . . . slightly." He and his other photographers would routinely stick flowers in the foreground to add colour; "a little gardening", it was called. One of them even planted a cactus garden in the foreground of a Canary Islands landscape to make it look more exotic.

But his greatest flair was to choreograph pictures. While some of these could look a little corny, the very best are the most beautiful postcards imaginable. Best are the early Irish scenes, where Hinde's alterations were more restrained. Consciously or not, in keeping with a noble tradition from the history of art, there would be some figures with their backs to the viewer, looking into an idyllic landscape, their warm-coloured jumpers glowing in a world of emerald greens and faraway blues. Truly, Hinde was the postcard equivalent of the great German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich.

Butlins was an altogether different proposition. The pictures were taken by three photographers, Elmar Ludwig, Edmund Nagele and David Noble. All are alive and well and still working today. And all three hated doing the Butlins pictures. They would spend hours rigging up intricate flash systems triggered by sensors to light the vast interiors. A flash bulb going off on a camper's Instamatic at the wrong moment could set them off. Tripods with flashlights and electric cables were positioned around the rooms, precarious enough in a studio but a disaster waiting to happen in a boozy lounge.

In the ballroom scene, careful scrutiny reveals that the picture has been flooded with light from the left-hand side. Bright white glare shows on the backs of the furthest dancers and others appear half-dazzled by a sheet of blinding light. As postcards, these details would have been barely noticeable or regarded as perfectly excusable in the context of a mass-produced trinket, which is essentially what the cards are. Now that the original large-format colour slides have been reprinted and enlarged, however, all the details and nuances are laid bare.

This process is the initiative of the photographer Martin Parr, who has organised a travelling exhibition of the Butlins pictures. (At Arles, France's premier photography festival, the slide show was the popular hit of the weekend.) When he was younger, Parr worked as a Butlins photographer himself, and he says he always relished Hinde's postcards. Yet the way in which Parr is presenting the work raises troubling questions, and there seems to be a layer of cynicism to his admiration for it.

As a postcard, the picture of the lounge bar and indoor heated pool at Butlins in Ayr, pictured, sings with colour and charm, in keeping with Hinde's own outlook on life. The boy's bright T-shirt and his mother's yellow cardigan complement the blue windows looking into the bottom of the pool. Her milkshake and his orange pop, the blue of his seat and the red of their table, these present themselves as optimistic objects in a medley of what was then modern consumerism.

Presented as a large deluxe print, however, re-incorporating the edges that were cropped out in the postcard, a certain shoddinesss is revealed. There is rust under the paintwork, cracks in the plaster, and the chairs are well worn. Butlins wonderland begins to look more like a bus station. It comes as no surprise that none of the three photographers have any enthusiasm for this contemporary reprinting of their work, which appears in a context for which it was never intended.

John Hinde's philosophy was that "pictures should always convey a positive, good feeling, something which makes people happy, which makes them smile, which makes them appreciate some tenderness". Parr, by contrast, has built a hugely successful career by making hard-eyed photographs of working-class culture. Indeed, the landmark in his early work was a series of cruelly sensational pictures of the run-down seaside resort at New Brighton near Liverpool.

Yet photography is a reflection of human nature; people's real motives are shown by the way they look at the subject they photograph. Equally, two people may look at an identical photograph, and while one may mock, the other might admire.

There is something about professional photography that encourages cynicism and a gloating superficiality that practitioners would be appalled to find applied to their own family snaps.

John Hinde's postcards are idealised, but straightforwardly so. His was no charm offensive; he relied instead on an approach that people could recognise as a sentimentalised view, and which was celebrated as such. They might be fantasies, but they are drawn from real life.

An exhibition of the John Hinde Butlins photographs will be held at the Photographers' Gallery, London WC2 in November, coinciding with publication of the book 'Our True Intent Is All For Your Delight' by Chris Boot